About 6 years ago, one of my friends reinvented RPC using HTTP. He wrote a couple of libraries around LWP and CGI that would allow you to use HTTP for abstract communications between systems, and we built tools that used this for publishing files and controlling remote services. At the time we didn't realize that he had invented a Service Oriented Architecture that would revolutionize the face of IT. Imagine our surprise when Microsoft and IBM reinvented it again a few years later and called it Web Services.